Who’s sharing — with whom?

With 400 million people and 2.1 billion sharing connections around the world, Dropbox is quickly becoming one of the world’s largest collaboration platforms. One in three users joined because someone else invited them, while the average Dropbox for Business user is connected with seven other businesses through Dropbox. In short, Dropbox becomes even more valuable when your friends, family, and co-workers are using it along with you.

And you’re doing a lot of working together — so much so that over 100,000 new shared folders and links are created on Dropbox every hour. We wanted to see what all that sharing means. So we took a closer look at US data to see how different states are sharing, and which ones collaborate the most using Dropbox. Today, we’re giving you a look, so you can see how your state stacks up.

How did we do it?

We ran an analysis of aggregated, anonymized sharing activity — when someone created a shared folder or a shared link — on Dropbox this past May. To get a better read on who was sharing for work, we stripped out anyone with an email address from an ISP (comcast.net, att.net, etc.) or popular free service (gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.).

Then we broke these aggregated stats by state, based on IP address. Taking the number of sharing users in each state, we could then easily determine what percentage of Dropbox users in each state were sharing.

And the winner is…

…not actually a state. It turns out that the District of Columbia edged out all 50 states.

Next, we took a look at when people in the top five states were collaborating. It turns out that while DC rules the work week, Californians are the top sharers over the weekend:

Taken on an hour-by-hour basis, the gap between DC and fifth-place Florida widens during the 9 to 5 workday. And as you might guess, collaboration for all five dips around lunchtime:

Who’s working together?

Also worth noting is which states each is working with. DC — perhaps unsurprisingly — works mostly with neighbors Virginia and Maryland, while California and New York collaborate with just about every other state:

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